Mar 13, 2010

Antje Schrupp

Antje is a journalist and political scientist who has been blogging on gender roles and related poltical issues since 2006. She's an independent thinker who has received a doctorate for her work in the field of female political philosophy.

What's your name, how old are you, and what do you do for a living (or all day, for that matter)?

My name is Antje Schrupp, I am 45 years old, a journalist, part-time editor, and publicist. This means that I write books, give speeches and host workshops.

I've loved the Internet right away, because it allows me to publish independently and to get in touch with interesting people.

What's your blog called and why?

My blog is called "Aus Liebe zur Freiheit" ["Of Love for Freedom"], because the idea of freedom is what motivates me. The interesting question is, of course, what "freedom" means.

What are you blogging about? Why?

I blog about all sorts of issues that come to my attention. Often they revolve around sex differences, i.e. gender roles, conflicts between men and women or differences amongst women themselves.

What interests me about them are not so much their origins or reasons, but what they mean for our everyday lives in particular, like which conflicts they cause.

Who's your target audience?

I don't blog for a certain target audience, but mostly for myself - I'm trying to keep track of my ideas, in order not to lose them. Hannah Arendt once said that she's only writing as to not forget what she thought. With me it's similar. I do enjoy it, though, when other people pick up what I wrote and join in on the discussion.

From replies and comments I can tell that I reach many different audiences: People who just surf the Net and stumble upon my blog because I wrote a piece on the Piraten Partei [a younger German political party that became famous for its fight for online civil rights] or because they know me from my books or events and are looking for print-outs - some of these people aren't online a lot at all. When these two worlds clash in the comments section, blogging becomes quite a balancing act.

Who designed your blog? How much was that? In case you designed your own layout: Where did you learn how to?

I just signed up with wordpress.com one day and chose one of their ready-made designs. That was free of charge, I am only paying a couple of dollars a year for my domain antjeschrupp.com.

My homepage I built with an HTML-modular system. I didn't find that difficult, but I'm not very ambitious when it comes to design at all.

Which software and which host do you use? Can you recommend them?Wordpress.com hosts their own blogs, so that was easy. I can recommend them alright, but I don't have much experience with other hosts to compare them to, I'm afraid.

Do you use photos, MP3-files or video clips on your blog? If yes, would you mind showing us one (please attach to this reply)?
I prefer blog posts that come with a picture. That's why I try to always add one. Videos and MP3 I only use from time to time - my blog is rather text-heavy. Sometimes, though, I use them to point to female artists.

Here, for example, is a picture of Kerstin Lichtblau, a paintress from Frankfurt who creates beautiful "Augenmädchen" [Eye Girls]. She's also a blogger: www.lichtblau.blogspot.com.

How many readers do you have? How many would you like to have? Does their number matter to you at all?

User traffic rates go up and down, but keep growing on the average. Currently, I have around 400 visits a day on my blog. Depending on the explosiveness of the topic, though, there are outliers. When I discussed the resignation of [ex-head of the German protestant church] Margot Käßmann or the three errors of feminism, I get over a thousand visitors a day. I believe my readers are mostly female.

With regards to my homepage, I am unaware of the exact number, but I do have a monthly newsletter that reaches 700 subscribers.

Can you learn how to blog? Do you need to know a lot about computers? Do you have any tips for beginners?

Because most blog software is self-explanatory nowadays, you don't have to know much about computers anymore at all. When it comes to writing, however, it is certainly an advantage to know some tools of journalism.

The most important thing to have is confidence that you have something to say. I find that women especially tend to feel that what they think is not important enough to be written down and shared. That makes me sad, because they make many great contributions in talks that are then lost for the general public.

Do you use twitter, too? Why (not)? What pros and cons do you see when it comes to twitter?

Yes, I have been using twitter under my real name @antjeschrupp. I like that Twitter puts me in touch with interesting people I would have probably never met otherwise. Twitter is a great platform to share spontaneous ideas that are too small to become blog entries in their own right. Plus, if you follow the right people, you'll get a lot of useful and interesting information out of it.

I bet I forgot many important ones, though. Luckily, there are a great many blogs written by women these days. But I like to read the blogs written by the men that appear on my timeline just the same, by the way.

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